His tongue can’t lie still it rounds his mouth, kicks inside like a mullet. Shirt buttons askew, his new black shoes filling with sand, he strides along the beach near the river’s edge nearly hyperventilating with excitement. He hears nothing but the water, and the sound of it has been in his ears all his life. And even now, one of the here is leaving.

Because, look, even the missing are there, the gone and taken are with them in the shade pools of the peppermints by the beautiful, the beautiful the river. Unless you knew, you’d think they were a whole group, an earthly vision. Someone blurts on a baby’s belly and a song strikes up. The speech is silenced by a melodious belch which gets big applause. There are things spilling from jars and bags. There’s pasties, a ham, chickenlegs and a basket of oranges, potato salad and dried figs. There’s ginger beer, staggerjuice and hot flasks of tea.

Twenty years, they all say, sprawling and drinking. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water’s edge. WILL you look at us by the river! The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. He opens up new worlds and sketches new ways of seeing and understanding the old one. Winton continues as one of my favorite writers. It “gets you,” as one critic noted, “inside the very skin of post-war working-class Australians the way Joyce makes you feel like a turn-of-century Dubliner.” It carries the reader through the lives of the several members of the two families as they struggle with addictions, depressions, illnesses, losses and each other and as they celebrate their very survival through the recessions, World War II, urbanization, the supernatural, love and a serial killer. As those later works, Winton’s prose in Cloudstreet is mesmerizingly energetic and flowing, linked intimately to the physical environment and to the human spirit. It preceded Riders (1994), Dirt Music(2001)-both of which were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize-and Breath (2008). The families-the Lambs and the Pickles-share during those 20 years a home in the suburbs of Perth named Cloudstreet, which itself emerges magically as one of the main characters. It is the saga of two Western Australian, working class families from 1944 through 1964. Cloudstreet is Tim Winton’s probably best known and best loved work, at least in Australia where it has been incorporated into the school curriculum and adapted for stage and television.

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